- We have a lot of words for unpleasant experiences:
We can call it negative mood,
we can call it stress, we can call it trauma.
All of these words have something in common,
and what they have in common is they all refer
to events that are really metabolically expensive.
Trauma: it's an experience that is constructed
like any other experience is constructed-
that doesn't trivialize it.
That just shows you the real power
of predictions in the economy of your everyday life.
What's happening when an adverse experience
becomes traumatic:
The brain is weighting that experience very heavily
in its future predictions.
From a metabolic standpoint, it's always better to predict
and correct, than it is to react.
The traumatic event is re-experienced again and again
and again, which only strengthens those connections,
and only makes those predictions more likely in the future.
And the reason why a brain would do this
is to avoid missing a threat.
The brain is building a model
of the world as a threatening place,
and it's constantly preparing the body to deal with that
over and over and over again.
And then the brain continues to make those predictions,
continues to model that world, and hasn't updated itself.
This idea that trauma lives in your body
or that your body somehow carries with it,
the mark of trauma.
It's based on this idea that you have this animalistic part
of a brain and that this somehow leads to adversity,
trauma, marking your body,
and you feeling the consequences of the trauma in your body-
and then treatments are designed to remove those marks
from your body.
And it turns out that many of the treatments
that I'm familiar with actually do show really good evidence
of working, but they don't work
because you have a cockroach brain or a lizard brain,
and they don't work because trauma is marking your body.
and your body is the scorecard.
Your experience of your body is actually constructed
and experienced in your brain.
Your body isn't what needs to be healed.
What needs to change is your brain's predictions
because those predictions are what construct your experience
of your body in the world,
and you have to find a way to break that cycle.
You are not trapped in traumatic predictions.
It is possible to change with a number of different methods.
The kind of dominant treatments for trauma like yoga,
the use of psychedelics, and sometimes, dance therapy,
or something embodied, like theater-
those are all really good ways of altering your predictions.
Partly what you're doing is creating new experiences
for yourself to flesh out
and make more flexible your brain's ability
to predict differently in the future.
You could describe the brain as a scientist, you know,
a scientist with a hypothesis-
that's what a set of predictions are.
It's a belief, a guess
about what sensations are about to happen,
and why they happen.
That's where those emotions come from.
And so like a good scientist,
you could test and see which hypothesis is the correct one.
That is something that, when you're recovering from trauma,
it's really important to do because the arousal
that you might feel might have something to do
with your uncertainty about which category is the right one.
And the only way to figure that out
is to get more information.
Some people might be concerned that what I'm saying
is that trauma is in your head, and I am saying trauma
is in your head, but everything is in your head.
Every beautiful sunset that you see, every hug
that you feel, every delicious drink that you have-
everything is in your head.
It is possible to recover from trauma.
That doesn't mean that traumatic memories
won't rear their ugly heads at some time in the future
but they don't have to dominate your brain's predictions.
And the fact that you have some control
over how to manage that content
is a gift.